Re: what to do is maintainer is lacking? (was: wine-unstable in Debian)
Le Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 10:00:43AM -0400, Chris Knadle a écrit :
>
> But what I'm seeing is that there are "in-between" states, where there doesn't
> seem to be any correct action to take. If a maintainer is not completely MIA
> but is going to not have any time for maintainership for 6 months, and several
> people are asking for the package to contain a newer version of the software
> rather than something 3 years old before the upcoming freeze -- what can one
> do? I think the current answer unentiontially ends up being some version of
> "get used to dissappointment"... so I'm asking the question in the hope of
> figuring out a better answer.
Hello everybody,
6 month is a long period of time for Debian. It is roughly a quarter of a
release cycle, and one third of the development part of it (between release and
freeze). Also, there are point stable release happening more than every six
months.
If somebody foresees he can not maintain his packages for the next six months,
I think that he should really consider mark his inactivity by proposing the
package for adoption, arranging co-maintenance in a team, switching on the
vacation flag on the LDAP, or ask his key to be moved to the emeritus keyring.
Unavailability can be mitigated in advance by having the package under team
maintainance. Everybody can join the collab-maint team if there is no thematic
team that fits better. When packages accumulate multiple NMUs, it is a kind
of team mainenance without the appropriate tools. It is not an upload that
helps a maintainer, but an upload that does not correct the fact that the
package is not maintained.
I understand that some workflows imply uploading to the delayed queue and
that this does not leave time to formally asking the maintainer if he
is still available, but for the second NMU in a row, perhaps it would be
better to directly orphan the package unless the first was acknowledged
in some way ?
Have a nice day,
--
Charles Plessy
Debian Med packaging team,
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan
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